Brooks Brothers: Modernizing a heritage brand for the digital age

Brian Schmidt: The primary thing that always stands out in the customer journey is that you don't have one customer that's a monolith in almost any business.

Brian Schmidt: When I apply that to Brooks Brothers, we have kids that are graduating from college, people that are interviewing for their first job, weddings and the customer that comes in for one is not going to be the same as the customer that comes in for another.

Kailin Noivo: Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Toolbox Expert Perspectives.

Kailin Noivo: Joining us today, we have Brian Schmidt all the way over from New York.

Kailin Noivo: He is the VP of Integrated Marketing Ecom for Brooks Brothers and Eddie Bauer.

Kailin Noivo: So, welcome to the show.

Brian Schmidt: Glad to be here.

Brian Schmidt: Thanks for having me.

Kailin Noivo: Awesome.

Kailin Noivo: So obviously, I did a bit of research before the show.

Kailin Noivo: You've been to a lot of really cool places from Walgreens to Groupon and different businesses.

Kailin Noivo: Why don't you give us a bit of a history of your career and how you ended up in a VP role for Catalyst Brands now, which is, kind of, a portfolio of companies?

Brian Schmidt: Yeah.

Brian Schmidt: So my degree was in music, which I, of course, went immediately on to use when I went to work for Walgreens.

Brian Schmidt: I always wanted to work in the marketing and business side, and I came up as a creative, sort of, in that music space.

Brian Schmidt: So, my career really followed different paths of marketing and CRM.

Brian Schmidt: You know, I really came in that side of the house, cut my teeth in email.

Brian Schmidt: I worked for Groupon for several years.

Brian Schmidt: And when I was at Groupon, I was grateful to be able to move into an expanded role that looked after North American customer acquisition and retention.

Brian Schmidt: Went to a startup, went to another startup, went to another startup.

Brian Schmidt: So I bounced around from a bunch of different kinds of businesses and now find myself as part of Catalyst Brands working in the retail apparel space, which is a new one for me.

Brian Schmidt: As you mentioned, I've been in a lot of different kinds of industries, and I feel like I've never been in the same industry twice.

Brian Schmidt: And this is an exciting time for me to be in a new space, especially with a company that's constantly evolving with the Spark Brands' recent merger with JCPenney.

Kailin Noivo: Yeah.

Kailin Noivo: So I mean, in the portfolio is a lot of really, really cool and historical brands.

Kailin Noivo: It sounds like you're focused mainly on Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer.

Kailin Noivo: Maybe talk to us a bit about, obviously, you're looking to modernize commerce in your role.

Kailin Noivo: How does that play out when you're working with companies that are literally hundreds of years old from their founding?

Brian Schmidt: Yeah.

Brian Schmidt: It's interesting.

Brian Schmidt: You know, my background actually is, kind of, hidden in there that I've done this a bit.

Brian Schmidt: I was at Hammacher Schlemmer, which was the oldest catalog company in the US.

Brian Schmidt: I was part of Walgreens.

Brian Schmidt: I was at Fender, the guitar company, and that's one, you know, guitars are very much an offline thing.

Brian Schmidt: You splurge for it and it’s very much offline. Alcohol delivery, modernizing that, which is a crazy industry.

Brian Schmidt: Broadway ticketing, which has been a thing that's been historically done offline.

Brian Schmidt: So I've always been in this sort of industry digital transformation space.

Brian Schmidt: I joined retail and apparel a little bit further along in their journey, but I think it's an interesting thing for brands like Brooks Brothers and Eddie Bauer that have more than a century of history to them.

Brian Schmidt: A lot of them started ecommerce in the early days of ecommerce.

Brian Schmidt: But the question is, do they have a modern stack now?

Brian Schmidt: And that's often the evolution problem that they run into.

Brian Schmidt: It's not that they haven't been selling things online for a long time.

Brian Schmidt: It's that they may be on a ten-year-old SAP system, or they may have some super old technology powering email or the website or whatever it may be, and then battling to get the funding to update that stack to be a more modern stack is always the thing.

Brian Schmidt: So I think that when I look at Brooks and Eddie Bauer, they came into the Spark portfolio from different places.

Brian Schmidt: I've got two brands that are on different ecommerce platforms.

Brian Schmidt: They've got similar-ish MarTech stacks.

Brian Schmidt: We talk about the JCPenney merger and how we're trying to find synergies across all the brands.

Brian Schmidt: So definitely always looking at the technology stack and seeing how we can evolve it to just help us really find those modern customer experiences and really modernize the stack to be the best digital business we can be.

Kailin Noivo: Yeah.

Kailin Noivo: And you'd mentioned, obviously, you're working with brands that are over 100 years old.

Kailin Noivo: I was reading before the show a bit about the 125th anniversary of the Oxford cloth button-down.

Kailin Noivo: Maybe talk to us a bit about that, what is that product, the history behind it.

Kailin Noivo: And from what I hear, you guys ran a pretty successful campaign on the back of that.

Kailin Noivo: So maybe talk to us a bit about that.

Brian Schmidt: Yeah.

Brian Schmidt: Brooks Brothers is a fascinating company.

Brian Schmidt: 207 years old.

Brian Schmidt: Founded right here in New York City in 1818.

Brian Schmidt: A ton of history because of that.

Brian Schmidt: We're the oldest clothier in the US.

Brian Schmidt: So we're the longest-running apparel brand in the US.

Brian Schmidt: And we were one of the first, if not the first brand in the US to offer off-the-rack sizing.

Brian Schmidt: After that, you've got every innovation that happened in clothing over the next 200 years.

Brian Schmidt: There's a ton of stuff, and it just happens that right at the turn of the twentieth century, I suppose, in the 1900s, right at that timeframe, we had a series of innovations, and one of them was the Oxford button-down collar.

Brian Schmidt: And that was a really interesting one because it really changed a lot about shirting.

Brian Schmidt: And that collar led to a number of things that would come afterwards in terms of how people thought about dress shirts overall.

Brian Schmidt: The way the story goes is that the Brooks Brothers, of which there were several, were at a polo match watching players play.

Brian Schmidt: And at that time, collars were not attached to shirts.

Brian Schmidt: They were stuffed inside of the collar of the shirt, and they would fly away during the polo match because the wind would catch them as they were riding around on horses.

Brian Schmidt: And then the legend goes that they thought that surely there's a better way, and what they thought to do was to button them down.

Brian Schmidt: And so, that's really the first time that collars were attached to shirts even, and it's the invention of the modern sport shirt in some ways.

Brian Schmidt: The full thing is that it's the Oxford button-down collar polo shirt, which is just where the invention started.

Brian Schmidt: But obviously, that's now become a big part of button-downs and dress shirts across the board for many, many years now.

Brian Schmidt: And I think there's even one in the MoMA collection around the history of apparel and fashion.

Brian Schmidt: So big moment in our history of many.

Brian Schmidt: We also invented non-iron among other things, but that was a big moment.

Brian Schmidt: And so, you know, coming up on the 125th anniversary of it feels like a great moment for a brand campaign, right?

Brian Schmidt: And Brooks Brothers hadn't really had a major brand campaign since they turned 200 back in 2018, which was a huge moment for the brand and spent a lot of money and did a lot of amazing activations that really helped the brand grow through 2018, 2019.

Brian Schmidt: Had some troubles and then COVID hit, and that's when the brand filed for bankruptcy and was ultimately acquired by Spark.

Brian Schmidt: So there's been some evolution in the brand since that time, and it felt like a good moment for us to get the brand back out there and get it just back in front of customers.

Brian Schmidt: And I think we found a really great way to do that with a great story—a classic heritage story, a very simple product for us to get behind.

Brian Schmidt: And we were able to just create an amazing campaign featuring, you know, a couple of celebrities, some really striking portraiture, and some interviews with them that led to a lot of success in out-of-home, CTV, and other channels for us.

Brian Schmidt: And it really has been a phenomenal campaign.

Brian Schmidt: We're still seeing impact from it months after it initially ran.

Kailin Noivo: Yeah.

Kailin Noivo: Very cool.

Kailin Noivo: And I saw a lot of buzz on it.

Kailin Noivo: I saw a huge billboard when I landed in Times Square not a couple months ago whenever the campaign ran.

Kailin Noivo: You just spoke at eTail Boston.

Kailin Noivo: You did a keynote on the customer journey from discovery to loyalty, and obviously, oversee multiple brands.

Kailin Noivo: You were with a couple of other folks.

Kailin Noivo: Maybe, yeah, looking back on that conversation now, what stood out to you the most?

Kailin Noivo: Yeah, I'd love to hear a bit more about your takeaways on the back of that conversation.

Brian Schmidt: Yeah.

Brian Schmidt: It was a super interesting conversation.

Brian Schmidt: It was an interesting collection of brands.

Brian Schmidt: We were all of us in slightly different spaces, although there was a CMO also on that panel that was in exactly the same space as me.

Brian Schmidt: I think in the conversations, there were a lot of different points of view on the customer, and obviously, the customer journey being the topic of that panel.

Brian Schmidt: But for me, the primary thing that always stands out in the customer journey is that you don't have one customer that's a monolith in almost any business.

Brian Schmidt: It's very, very rare that you're like, "This is my singular customer journey. This is the only kind of customer I have."

Brian Schmidt: And when I apply that to Brooks Brothers, for example, we have kids that are graduating from college and getting a suit for that.

Brian Schmidt: We have people that are interviewing for their first job or finding themselves in a job that actually requires them to be dressed up in a different way.

Brian Schmidt: We have weddings.

Brian Schmidt: We've got all these different life moments that happen, and the customer that comes in for one is not going to be the same as the customer that comes in for another.

Brian Schmidt: If it's a kid fresh out of college who's graduating or a CEO, they have slightly different missions than what they're trying to purchase and then what their purchase behavior will be afterwards.

Brian Schmidt: And so when you go to map it out, you just gotta make sure that you're not thinking about one customer, but you do a little bit of due diligence to say, "Hey, these are my four or five customer personas that matter."

Brian Schmidt: Maybe it's two, three, maybe it's four, five.

Brian Schmidt: Don't go to twenty because then you're getting too many.

Brian Schmidt: It's gonna be hard to break it apart.

Brian Schmidt: But just thinking about that there are going to be a couple of distinct customer journeys, and you've gotta think about different customer pools differently in order to get the maximum impact from your work.

Kailin Noivo: Yeah.

Kailin Noivo: And one thing that surprised me a little bit on the campaign side, but I'm very curious to hear your opinion.

Kailin Noivo: Obviously, when you have a very historic brand, you have a lot of brand equity.

Kailin Noivo: And you guys do some pretty interesting slash really cool collaborative campaigns that maybe have a bit of creative risk in them.

Kailin Noivo: How are you guys balancing that to make sure that you don't deviate too far?

Kailin Noivo: Actually, what's interesting is this is not to date the podcast, but this is the week of the Cracker Barrel back-and-forth logo, right?

Kailin Noivo: Not that we wanna get into that, but obviously, people wanna evolve, but sometimes it creates potentially unforeseen challenges.

Kailin Noivo: So maybe talk to us a bit about how you're balancing taking on creative risk without potentially upsetting the base.

Brian Schmidt: Yeah.

Brian Schmidt: It's interesting.

Brian Schmidt: On the Brooks side of the house, you know, Brooks Brothers does have tremendous heritage.

Brian Schmidt: We've got a very loyal customer base.

Brian Schmidt: And over time, we've seen at the moments we've strayed too far from who we are or made changes to the product line, we hear about it from our customers.

Brian Schmidt: They are not shy about giving us feedback.

Brian Schmidt: They haven't been for over 200 years.

Brian Schmidt: Actually, one of my favorites—just to go back to the history slightly—one of my favorite moments of history for Brooks Brothers is that we actually have in our archives a complaint letter from Mary Todd Lincoln because her order was late.

Brian Schmidt: So we've been getting complaints up and down the board for a long time, you know, when there's issues that our customers are not afraid to tell us.

Brian Schmidt: So, you know, if we're changing product shape and size, if we're going too much in a certain direction, they're gonna tell us about it.

Brian Schmidt: So we're always careful not to stray too far from our core and to make sure that we're maintaining the core offering.

Brian Schmidt: But then, we're willing to play in spaces where we can leverage it to put the brand in more modern contexts, I would say, is probably the most accurate way to think about it.

Brian Schmidt: And so at 207, it's not that we're trying to find a way to be cool.

Brian Schmidt: That's hard to be at a heritage brand.

Brian Schmidt: But trying to find a way to break through to younger demographics, to find a way to leverage history to tell new stories, there's always a ton of stuff that we're working on in that space and trying to get it right.

Brian Schmidt: And it also does not say that we always get it right either.

Brian Schmidt: I think the partnerships that we have done in the last couple of years and some of the ones we have coming up, there's some of them that are really great.

Brian Schmidt: I'm really excited about a couple of them that are coming.

Brian Schmidt: And there's some of them that we've done where it's like, "I understand what we're going for. We didn't quite nail it. Didn't quite hit the mark."

Brian Schmidt: Or, you know, we do something and, you know, you do a partnership with somebody and you make 100 pieces of it.

Brian Schmidt: If it isn't a PR splash, no one even knows that you did it.

Brian Schmidt: There's probably customers that don't know about certain collabs we've even done because they weren't done to scale or didn't have media pickup or they didn't have the right support from a marketing perspective.

Brian Schmidt: So gotta make sure that you're also doing the right things to make the collabs worth it.

Brian Schmidt: But I think there's a lot that we're still thinking about.

Brian Schmidt: How do we tell our modern fit story?

Brian Schmidt: How do we talk about our expanded product lines?

Brian Schmidt: How do we take preppy, which is back, and bring it into the context of streetwear, if that makes sense, or into these other situations?

Brian Schmidt: So we're always thinking about different kinds of collabs and partnerships.

Brian Schmidt: And we've got a long history of great ones, and we got a bunch of good ones coming too.

Kailin Noivo: Yeah.

Kailin Noivo: And you actually just touched on a point where I wanted to take the conversation next.

Kailin Noivo: How are you guys staying relevant to the cultural changes across multiple brands?

Kailin Noivo: I recently just did an episode, and the exec I was chatting with is in the outdoor wear space.

Kailin Noivo: And she was talking a bit about how wearing outdoor clothes to the office or, kind of as streetwear is somewhat of a Gen Z trend.

Kailin Noivo: So maybe talk to us a bit about the trends.

Kailin Noivo: Do you guys hop on them early, hop on them late, somewhere in the middle?

Kailin Noivo: How are you thinking about them?

Brian Schmidt: I think we were probably later to trends than other brands are.

Brian Schmidt: I think some of that is just the stalwart nature of the heritage of the brand.

Brian Schmidt: We're not pivoting incredibly quickly with trends.

Brian Schmidt: You know, we're gonna see where things are going.

Brian Schmidt: So generally speaking, you're not gonna find us on the bleeding edge of a trend.

Brian Schmidt: Now that said, one of the trends that we have seen is that fashion is incredibly cyclical, and the cycles seem to be getting tighter.

Brian Schmidt: And so I think, as I'm gonna make an assumption about millennials.

Brian Schmidt: We may be looking at things like, "Oh, yeah. That was the nineties for us," right, or the early 2000s.

Brian Schmidt: That's back in fashion now for Gen Z, and we're seeing it in a lot of different spaces.

Brian Schmidt: And so you will have seen in the last year, especially in high fashion, which tends to filter down and through, preppy is back.

Brian Schmidt: So Hermès is doing preppy lines and other folks are doing preppy lines.

Brian Schmidt: That's great because we are the original preppy.

Brian Schmidt: And so that gives us some lift in some spaces.

Brian Schmidt: For example, Rugby’s are up 26% this year for us.

Brian Schmidt: Just like the classic rugby shirt, we've been selling that for a long, long time.

Brian Schmidt: And so when those cycles come back through, we have been fortunate to take advantage of them in some of the stuff we've historically offered.

Brian Schmidt: Now that said, how can we find the moments to be culturally relevant?

Brian Schmidt: We've done a lot in film and TV.

Brian Schmidt: We do dress celebrities.

Brian Schmidt: We're on red carpets.

Brian Schmidt: You know, we spend a lot of time in that space, and that's always gonna be an important piece of being part of the culture is being on the people that are part of the culture, right?

Brian Schmidt: So there's a lot of moments that we look for there.

Brian Schmidt: And again, we're always trying to figure out what the ways are where we can put ourselves in the modern context, but not reinvent ourselves because we do have a lot of history.

Brian Schmidt: There's a lot of heritage here.

Brian Schmidt: We have incredible value and an incredible quality brand, and we don't need to run away from that just to chase, you know, a flash in the pan or, you know, a certain fifteen-minute moment.

Brian Schmidt: It's how do we find those right contexts to be interesting to new generations or take advantage of moments as they pop up that include us, like quiet luxury or something else.

Kailin Noivo: Are you guys using any of your brick-and-mortar locations?

Kailin Noivo: I mentioned I was in New York not too long ago, and I think I stopped by, actually by coincidence, your Lower Manhattan store, just one of the flagships.

Kailin Noivo: How are you guys thinking about leveraging that type of historic space that you have to tell that story?

Kailin Noivo: How does that feed back into the omnichannel strategy that you guys are running?

Brian Schmidt: Stores are huge for both of my brands, Brooks Brothers and Eddie Bauer.

Brian Schmidt: They play a slightly different role for both brands.

Brian Schmidt: Obviously, Eddie Bauer, outerwear brand, going through a little bit of a brand reinvention for itself right now where it's trying to move from being really top-of-the-mountain outdoors to being, you know, our most recent campaign "For the Outdoors and the Outdoorsy," so a little bit of every man in the outdoors.

Brian Schmidt: Brooks Brothers, obviously, suiting is the core.

Brian Schmidt: Suiting and dress shirts, and a lot of people will know Brooks Brothers primarily for suiting even though we're kind of more of a men's department store in terms of total offering.

Brian Schmidt: But the suits are hard to buy online.

Brian Schmidt: They're incredibly hard to buy online, and most guys don't buy suits that often.

Brian Schmidt: And so I would say most people don't know what their suit size is going to be when they go to buy a suit online.

Brian Schmidt: So having those physical locations is essential to having a really crisp and clean customer experience across our core categories.

Brian Schmidt: The Brooks Brothers brand is majority stores in terms of total revenue.

Brian Schmidt: Web's doing a decent amount, and web and stores are a little bit more even on the Eddie Bauer side.

Brian Schmidt: But in both those cases, you know, the stores are an essential element, and they're really essential to that customer experience.

Brian Schmidt: So you're talking about our new flagship in New York, which we consider to be our global flagship at 195 Broadway.

Brian Schmidt: It's in the amazing historic AT&T Building.

Brian Schmidt: It's actually not far from where the original Brooks Brothers store was, which was near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, fifty years before the Brooklyn Bridge was built.

Brian Schmidt: And there's some really interesting things in that space.

Brian Schmidt: It's a really gorgeous space.

Brian Schmidt: We do plan to use it for a lot of different events, whether those are private functions or having celebrities or different folks come through.

Brian Schmidt: We had a partnership with Jalen Brunson last year, and he did some visits to stores, and we had customer events there.

Brian Schmidt: So we do try and use those spaces in a variety of different ways.

Brian Schmidt: But at the end of the day, it's really where our customer experience lives.

Brian Schmidt: And we try to make our digital experience as good as it can be.

Brian Schmidt: But for a brand that sells what we sell on the Brooks Brothers side, sometimes that high-touch in-person is really critical.

Brian Schmidt: And so that's where our stores just come in clutch for us all the time is to just build that relationship with the customer.

Kailin Noivo: I heard you mention earlier synergies, right?

Kailin Noivo: So obviously, you're managing multiple brands.

Kailin Noivo: There's multiple brands as part of the portfolio.

Kailin Noivo: How are you thinking about creating synergies amongst the brands?

Kailin Noivo: Is it in a pitch deck somewhere, there's something about sharing data across brands and stuff like that.

Kailin Noivo: Maybe how does this actually work out pragmatically?

Brian Schmidt: Yeah.

Brian Schmidt: There's a lot of different ways that when you've got a bunch of apparel brands, especially that there are, you're gonna find these moments where you've got a lot of people are doing similar things or you've got similar needs, especially in the technology side.

Brian Schmidt: So for the audience, Spark Brands, as it merged with JCPenney, we now are Catalyst Brands.

Brian Schmidt: Catalyst Brands is made up of JCPenney, Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer, Aéropostale, Nautica, and Lucky Brand.

Brian Schmidt: So it's six relatively different brands.

Brian Schmidt: Obviously, we have one major department store and then five what we would call specialty brands ranging from Brooks Brothers to Aéropostale.

Brian Schmidt: So you've got an average age in the Gen X range and an average age in the Gen Z or Gen Alpha range.

Brian Schmidt: So you've got a pretty wide spread of those customers, right?

Brian Schmidt: So when in that PE deck they're going, "You should share data," like, "Maybe you have the same customers," it's like, "Uh, maybe not the same customers between Aéro and Brooks."

Brian Schmidt: And we've looked at that stuff, and I think we've tried to leverage what we can there.

Brian Schmidt: But at the end of the day, we recognize the customers are different.

Brian Schmidt: And so we're not trying to force a synergy in that space.

Brian Schmidt: We're not trying to push the Aéro customer to be the Brooks Brothers customer, the Lucky customer to be the Brooks Brothers customer.

Brian Schmidt: We're not even trying to—and my two brands that I'm operating, I'm not even trying to push Eddie Bauer customers to be Brooks Brothers customers.

Brian Schmidt: Now there's some overlap, obviously, but not going hard at that particular angle.

Brian Schmidt: But then when you look at the broader side of things, you're gonna find synergies across so many different locations.

Brian Schmidt: Multiple of the Catalyst brands sell jeans.

Brian Schmidt: So if we're buying denim, are there synergies across how we buy denim, who we work with in partnerships there?

Brian Schmidt: There's gonna be those kinds of things.

Brian Schmidt: On the marketing side, technology is a huge thing.

Brian Schmidt: Are we all on the same email provider contract?

Brian Schmidt: Are we all on the same agency?

Brian Schmidt: Are we getting the scale of fees that we can be getting or the scale of contract we can be getting with any one partner?

Brian Schmidt: So definitely looking at a lot of the technology right now to say, "Hey, is this doing what we need it to do? And also, can it do what we need it to do?"

Brian Schmidt: When we look at the ecommerce vendors, JCPenney is a multibillion-dollar ecommerce business.

Brian Schmidt: Nautica is not.

Brian Schmidt: Does Nautica need the same technology as JCPenney?

Brian Schmidt: Probably not in a number of cases.

Brian Schmidt: And so where does it make sense?

Brian Schmidt: Where doesn't it make sense?

Brian Schmidt: That's a big part of what we're working through right now is trying to make the best decisions for driving the business and also make the decisions that allow us to find cost efficiencies where we can redeploy those dollars into marketing, redeploy those dollars into other projects like growing our store footprint or whatnot.

Brian Schmidt: So there's a lot of really great things that the team's been working through, and we've made a tremendous amount of progress, and there's a long way still to go.

Kailin Noivo: On that thread, what was one of the biggest surprising synergies that you found, and what was the biggest misconception that you discovered around synergies?

Brian Schmidt: That's an interesting question.

Brian Schmidt: I would say there's still a lot of things that we haven't actualized yet that are good ideas in concept.

Brian Schmidt: And so there's a lot of stuff that we're gonna find out whether or not this was real or not when it comes down to it.

Brian Schmidt: And there is one concept about—because all the brands were not on the same ecommerce platform—where we're like, "Hey, if we just move to this one platform, it'll be way cheaper for us to go there. We're gonna save a ton of money if we move all the smaller brands to this ecommerce platform."

Brian Schmidt: And we looked at it and went, "Oh, actually, when you look at all of the technology that goes in, that ecommerce platform is actually not a huge percentage of the budget. It's in our CDP. It's in our ESP. It's on our hosting platform. It's in the CDN. It's all these tools that support the business."

Brian Schmidt: And so just migrating by itself, maybe there's some savings there after you count the massive migration costs of moving.

Brian Schmidt: But I think it was one where a lot of leadership team members were like, "Oh, yeah. This is an easy way for us to save money."

Brian Schmidt: And then when we looked at it, we're like, "Oh, actually not—actually not gonna save the dollars we thought we were gonna save."

Brian Schmidt: And so it sets up more of a long-term conversation of, "Is this the right decision for us long term? Do we still wanna do this even though the synergy isn't necessarily there or isn't immediately there as far as savings and things go?"

Brian Schmidt: On the other side of things, I think when we looked at some of the contracts with some of the partners, Brooks Brothers and JCPenney both have loyalty programs.

Brian Schmidt: We were both using the same provider.

Brian Schmidt: When we went to them and said, "Hey, we're gonna combine these and we're thinking about maybe launching loyalty programs with other brands, what does our rate look like?"

Brian Schmidt: The rate that they came back with was much, much better than either of our previous contracts.

Brian Schmidt: And so when certain vendors came back, and you're like, "Wait. How are we both combined on a contract now paying less than what either of us were paying previously? How much were you charging us previously?"

Brian Schmidt: That's been a really funny conversation as certain things have popped up as far as, "Hey, what's the buying power of JCPenney combined with the other brands?” Or just getting a moment to relook at things and be like, "Hey, actually, we didn't get as good of a deal as we thought the first time around."

Brian Schmidt: That's been some of the funnier things that we found for sure.

Kailin Noivo: That's awesome.

Kailin Noivo: And Brian, thank you so much for your time.

Kailin Noivo: This has been a phenomenal episode, and I really appreciate your time.

Brian Schmidt: Absolutely.

Brian Schmidt: Happy to be here.

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